Ritual Creates Community

Ritual is a mixed media art form.

It is a combination of word and song, smell and sight to create a sense of the extraordinary.  Or maybe more accurately it is to create a heightened sense of what the ordinary really is. To vault the ordinary into the sacred, or to notice that it was already there.  Emotional sleight of hand if you will.

We can do this by ourselves and it can be a powerful experience.  A feather that was a gift, a twig from a special tree.  All the little things we used to collect as children.  Those wonderful treasures that life gives us can form the core of something that has great meaning and brings us peace and tranquility.  But that feather only means so much to you, and maybe to the person who gave it to you.  To me the greater challenge is to learn to speak a symbolic language that others can understand.

Ritual with others is a form of collaborative art.

It takes the same sort of sacredness that we might discover on our own, sitting in front of a candle in a darkened room and casts the shadow of that fire large upon the wall.  Everything is bigger, more complicated and also less personal.

Beltane Maypole

This weekend I will be leading an ADF style Druidic rite at Convocation in a room full of strangers.  There will be people there collaborating with me.  We’ve been emailing furiously for a couple of weeks now, ironing out all the details and necessary items for our semi-improvizational ceremonial theatre.  I have meditated, written, edited, and researched in order to create this upcoming moment.

Why do group ritual at all, let alone have ceremonies where complete strangers participate?  Why go through all this work and preparation, for about an hour of time?

Because the gain outweighs the risk.

Midsummer Night

It outweighs the work and the research.  It’s all worth it and I’ll tell you why.

Community.

One word that can mean so many things.  In my mind it evokes images of tidy neighborhoods, of schools and boring City Hall meetings.   But it also evokes a more powerful image.  I see a moment in time where people come together and do something wonderful.  They reach out to each other and for a little while they put off from themselves the chores and failures, the struggles and successes of the daily world. They are fearless because they are with each other.  They might sing, or chant, or move together and if you’re very very lucky, there will come a moment when the boundaries of self lift away and the only word that applies is We.  We sang, we danced, we felt as one not only with each other, but with the world around us.  We came in contact with that elusive moment of the sacred. Together we felt the transcendent touch of the divine.

That’s what makes our community worth something.  That’s what gives it power and strength.

So I’ve spent the last couple of days working on cutting out fabric and refining my words. I gathered my tools and packed my bags.    My husband took on extra work at home so I’d have time.  He’s watching the kids while I run off to play Druid with my friends.  It’s so worth it.  Wish us luck, we’re playing with magic.